His conversational abilities won him the friendship of Lord Macclesfield (chief justice 1710–1718), who introduced him to Joseph Addison, described by Mandeville as "a parson in a tye-wig."

[7] In 1714, the poem was republished as an integral part of the Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, consisting of a prose commentary, called Remarks, and an essay, An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue.

The book was primarily written as a political satire on the state of England in 1705, when the Tories were accusing John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and the ministry of advocating the War of the Spanish Succession for personal reasons.

[7] Mandeville also believed that educating the poor increased their desires for material things, defeating the purpose of the school and making it more difficult to provide for them.

[8] It was vigorously combatted by, among others, Bishop Berkeley and William Law, author of The Serious Call, and in 1729 was made the subject of a prosecution for its immoral tendency.

The higher life of man is a mere fiction introduced by philosophers and rulers to simplify government and the relations of society.

In fact, virtue (which he defined as "every performance by which man, contrary to the impulse of nature, should endeavour the benefit of others, or the conquest of his own passions, out of a rational ambition of being good") is actually detrimental to the state in its commercial and intellectual progress.

It was his stated belief in the Fable of the Bees that "Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits".

(The Fable of the Bees, Volume two)Mandeville was a lifelong vegetarian, who embraced the concept, advanced by Gassendi, that non-human animals are sentient.

Denying any form of moral sense or conscience, he regards all the social virtues as evolved from the instinct for self-preservation, the give-and-take arrangements between the partners in a defensive and offensive alliance, and the feelings of pride and vanity artificially fed by politicians, as an antidote to dissension and chaos.

[citation needed] Mandeville's ironic paradoxes are a criticism of the "amiable" idealism of the Earl of Shaftesbury; their irony contrasts with the serious egoistic systems of Hobbes and Helvétius.

[6] Mandeville's ideas about society and politics were praised by Friedrich Hayek, a proponent of Austrian economics, in his book Law, Legislation and Liberty.

[citation needed] Karl Marx, in his seminal work Capital, praised Mandeville as "an honest man with a clear mind" for his conclusion that the wealth of society depended on the relative poverty of workers.

[citation needed] Renatus Willemsen, Bernard Mandeville : een ondeugende denker?, Noordboek, 2022.Other works attributed, wrongly, to him are The World Unmasked (1736) and Zoologia medicinalis hibernica (1744).